Conoscere attraverso le immagini: genesi e forma degli atlanti. Una svolta epistemologica della prima età moderna

From about 1530, a complex conglomeration of social practices of learning, which saw the pivotal role of printed books production, gave rise to a renewal of whole fields of knowledge – from anatomy to architecture, from natural history to geography, to name just a few – through the innovative production and dissemination of ordered and organised corpora of cognitive images. These editorial enterprises had the ambition of mapping and redefining these realms of knowledge through the production of unprecedented cognitive images organised in large corpora. The wide-ranging as well as collaborative efforts of physicians, architects, natural philosophers, cosmographers, artists, engravers and printers, were poured into books generally identified by titles such as atlas, compendium, cosmographia, descriptio, speculum, theatrum, which share the characteristic of being centred on normalised and serial images forming open-ended thematic collections which could be increased ad infinitum. The epistemological turn implemented through this editorial enterprises was rooted into images that were not conceived as illustrations of written or practical knowledge, to which they would play a subordinate role. On the contrary, they were the centre of those fields of knowledge, real lieux des savoirs, onto which numerous practices, relative to the production, organisation, archiving and transmission of knowledge, ultimately converged. This article has two main objectives: in the first place, it aims at shedding light on the intellectual roots and the visual archeology of printed atlases in the early modernity; secondly, it will endeavour to analyse and contextualise the so-called prototypes of geographical atlases – works by Münster, Ortelius, Mercator and Lafreri – in the framework of a far-reaching epistemological shift, specific to early modernity, which went well beyond the domains of geography and cartography. This study will highlight how geographic atlases prined in Northern Europe or in Italy in the sixteenth century were not the prototypes of this innovative book production, but rather became part of a process that had already started many decades earlier, becoming, together with anatomical and architectural treatises, its best and most effective examples of editorial success.